From the BBC:

Israel has announced a boycott of the Arabic broadcaster al-Jazeera, accusing it of bias during coverage of the conflict in the Gaza Strip.

Ministers will refuse to do interviews and will deny visa applications from its staff, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Majali Wahbe said.

He accused the Qatari-owned station of prioritising Palestinian suffering.

The station's Jerusalem bureau chief denied bias and said Israel was trying to influence media coverage.

Israeli officials backed their claim by saying al-Jazeera had covered the Gaza incursion but not the Palestinian rocket attacks against the Israeli city of Ashkelon.

Former CIA official Michael Scheuer, last heard from (in book form) in 2004's Imperial Hubris, has a new volume out -- Marching Towards Hell: America and Islam After Iraq.

The NYT's Michiko Kakutani doesn't much like the new tome.

Ethan Zuckerman, who works at Harvard Law School's Berkman Centre on Internet and Society, holds forth on how Web 2.0 has spurred online activism, and that's what good for posters of porn and cute cats is also good for dissidents.

The nut graf:

With web 2.0, we’ve embarced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. as a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on - the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audiences.

(Thanks, Kevin S.)

From a March 11 Reporters without Borders news release:

Afghan journalist Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi gave a news conference today at Reporters Without Borders headquarters in Paris about the plight of his brother, Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, a fellow journalist who is under sentence of death in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan.

"I last saw my brother on 7 March in prison," Ibrahimi said. "Like any prisoner sentenced to death, he was very anxious. And he is in danger all the time because there are around 30 criminals with him in his cell. He should be transferred to a prison where he would be safe. That is why we have asked the government not to put him in a prison with terrorists in Kabul."

Contradicting what has been said in many reports, Ibrahimi insisted that his brother never downloaded, printed or distributed a controversial report about what the Koran has to say about women’s rights.

"This was a plot by students close to the fundamentalists who added his name to this report," Ibrahimi said. "They then alerted the secret services and the clerics. It was all trumped up. Perwiz never distributed this document. This should be clear. I am the target behind all this because of my articles criticising the crimes of the warlord and their allies, the religious fundamentalists." 

Could someone please educate me on the difference between smoked wild sockeye salmon and smoked organic wild sockeye salmon -- other than the $2 per kilogram in price, of course.

No explanation, no matter how tortured and convoluted, will be scoffed at.

I would particularly be interested in knowing how something that's wild could be anything but organic.

Khaled Abdu Ahmed Saleh al-Maqtari, a 31-year-old Yemeni national, talked to Amnesty International about the more than 32 months he spent in the shadows of the CIA's black prison sites.